GrafanaCON 2025: Agenda highlights and how to start planning your conference experience today
Okay, sure: Sleepless in Seattle is a charming ’90s rom-com featuring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. But this year, it’s also something else: the perfect catchphrase to describe just how much fun you’ll have at GrafanaCON 2025.
Our annual community event focused on all things Grafana and its extended open source ecosystem is set to take place May 6-8 in (you guessed it!) Seattle — and we could not be more excited about what’s in store.
We look forward to every GrafanaCON event as an amazing opportunity to share the latest and greatest in our open source projects, spotlight user stories, and, most importantly, connect with members of our community.
But this year, in particular, feels really special. In addition to two days of technical deep dives and user-led sessions, the GrafanaCON 2025 agenda is jam-packed with interactive activities that help you get more hands-on with the tech, foster your creativity, and build connections with fellow community members that will last long after the event itself.
Read on to learn more. And, if you haven’t already, you can also check out the full GrafanaCON 2025 agenda today.
Hands-on labs
Sometimes, doing is simply the best way of learning.
That’s why GrafanaCON 2025 kicks off May 6 with a series of hands-on labs, led by Grafana Labs experts. These three-hour sessions are designed to give you firsthand experience in building new dashboards, data sources, and telemetry pipelines.
Morning sessions
- Grafana as code: Build and deploy your dashboards at scale: Walk through common use cases for building dashboards from code, and then compose dashboards and build your own pipeline to deploy them into a Grafana instance.
- Best practices to level up your Grafana dashboarding skills: Learn tips and tricks for creating impactful dashboards. Explore data formats, transformations, and best practices to configure Grafana dashboards to meet your needs.
Afternoon sessions
- Building OpenTelemetry and Prometheus native telemetry pipelines with Grafana Alloy: Learn to build telemetry pipelines from start to finish with with Grafana Alloy, using Alloy’s Prometheus and OpenTelemetry components to receive, transform, and ship data from a set of demo APIs and a Postgres database to Grafana observability backends.
- Bridge the gap to your data: Create a custom data source for Grafana: Learn how to create your own custom data source plugin for Grafana from scratch using Grafana’s developer tools.
Note: Tickets for hands-on labs can only be purchased with a conference ticket, and you can choose up to one morning and one afternoon lab. Learn more and register on our GrafanaCON 2025 hands-on labs web page.
Night at the Museum (of Pop Culture)
The world’s most extensive Nirvana exhibition? Check.
A Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame? You got it.
A chance to make real connections with other members of the open source community? Definitely.
On Wednesday, May 7 at 6:30 p.m., we’ll hold a welcome reception, sponsored by AWS, for all GrafanaCON 2025 attendees at the Museum of Pop Culture. Join us to toast the OSS community in Seattle’s stunning landmark, which showcases notable pop culture moments and memorabilia.
The GrafanaCON Science Fair
Time to dust off those ol’ tri-folder poster boards.
GrafanaCON 2025 will feature our inaugural Science Fair, where you’ll have a chance to play and interact with projects demonstrating all the different things you can monitor with Grafana. Here’s a sneak peek at what’s in store:
- Monitoring a 3D printer: The team from PRUSA will be monitoring a 3D printer using Grafana as they print Grafana-themed shapes (see below)!
- Gone with the wind tunnel: Grafana Labs CTO Tom Wilkie built a desktop wind tunnel for 1:43 scale model race cars. It uses Grafana to monitor the flow of air over the cars. (Bonus: Enter to win the wind tunnel!)
- Observing IoT devices: The Grafana team built dashboards to track various IoT devices that will monitor everything from drone flight speeds to the venue’s temperature, humidity, and atmospheric pressure.
- Quest World sponsored by AWS: Quest World is an interactive text-based adventure game teaching the fundamentals of metrics, logs, and traces through OpenTelemetry. Learn how each of these signals can all be tied together through the LGTM stack. Do you have what it takes to defeat the evil wizard?
- Grafana Labs hackathon projects: Each year, our internal hackathons produce projects that go on to shape our products — and some that are just plain entertaining! Check out the hackathon booth for some of the most popular interactive projects thus far, including Dash Dash Revolution and Doomfana.
The GrafanaCON Science Fair will run all day on May 7 and 8. You can learn more here.
Birds of a feather discussions
Our open source community is at the heart of every GrafanaCON event. This year, with our new Birds of a feather discussions, we hope to make it even easier for you to find and connect with community members with shared experiences and interests.
Please join us at one (or multiple!) of the following Birds of a feather sessions to engage in small, intimate group discussions with fellow GrafanaCON attendees.
Women & gender minorities in tech
Wednesday, May 7, 8:00-8:45 a.m.
Join us for an open discussion on the experience of gender minorities and women in tech. We’ll discuss the unique challenges underrepresented genders face in the industry, explore strategies for building inclusive teams and cultures, and share career growth and development tips. Whether you’re a seasoned professional or just starting your career, your voice matters. Let’s work together to create a more equitable and diverse tech landscape. We promise to be a safe space for you to share your thoughts!
Grafana Champions & community organizers
Wednesday, May 7, 8:00-8:45 a.m.
Join us to explore key aspects of the Grafana & Friends community organizer program and the Grafana Champions program. We’ll discuss maximizing your impact as a community leader, leveraging AI for enhanced engagement, and staying current with Grafana’s evolving ecosystem. This session is for all Grafana enthusiasts seeking to connect, learn, and contribute. Share your insights, ask questions, and help shape the future of our community.
Grafana & OpenTelemetry
Thursday, May 8, 8:00-8:45 a.m.
Participate in a group discussion on Grafana and OpenTelemetry, two tools that are essential for modern observability and enable teams to monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize applications easily. Meet with project maintainers and contributors and learn best practices for setup, real-world use cases, and how to leverage these tools to gain deeper insights into your infrastructure and application performance. Bring your questions and experiences to discuss with the community.
Databases (Tempo, Pyroscope, Mimir, Loki)
Thursday, May 8, 8:00-8:45 a.m.
Join us for a facilitated group discussion on Grafana’s powerful open source databases for observability telemetry: Loki, Mimir, Tempo, and Pyroscope. The open discussion will unite users, maintainers, and experts to share experiences, challenges, and best practices. Whether you’re optimizing performance, troubleshooting issues, or building robust monitoring pipelines, come to this BoF session to connect, learn, and contribute.
Ask the Experts booth
You’ve got questions, we’ve got answers.
The Ask the Experts booth has always been a favorite of GrafanaCON attendees — and for our engineers. Be sure to bring your technical questions, use cases, and, of course, your dashboards to the booth to connect directly with the engineers who work on Grafana, Loki, OpenTelemetry, and more.
The Ask the Experts booth also runs all day, May 7 and 8.
Can’t wait to see you there.
The countdown to GrafanaCON 2025 has begun! If you haven’t already, register for the event today.
